The Animators(38)

I do not want to talk to my sister. “Well, I don’t want to—”

“Here she is.” She cups the mouthpiece, says audibly to Shauna, “She’s right here. Come on.”

Some protest, then Shauna’s on. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Mom says you’re sick?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

That same note of blame. I let my head fall back into the pillow. Jesus, Mary, and the fucking donkey. “I had a stroke.”

“Oh my God. Are you okay?”

“Getting better. It was small. I was lucky.”

“Well, that’s good. You sound all right.”

“Thanks.” I pluck at the blanket, glance over at my sketchpad. “It was an aneurysm. It broke.”

Shauna makes this huh sound between a laugh and a grunt. “Um…hope you feel better?”

“Thanks, Shauna. Shit.”

“Come on. You know what I mean.”

“How are the kids?”

“Oh, they’re good,” she sighs. “Caelin is bugging me to get Glamour Shots cause she saw our old ones.”

I smack my hand into my forehead. Forced to wear false eyelashes at age seven. Just one in a long list of household abominations. “You gonna do it?”

There’s a moist chomp: whitening gum. My sister’s a dental hygienist. Her teeth are horribly perfect. Straight, bleached, gums tight and pink. “Well, if she wants to do it, Sharon, I don’t see nothin wrong with it.”

“Good job.”

“Whatever. I gotta go.”

“Okay.”

“Come down and visit before Mom has a shitfit. Okay? Bye.”

—

The day before my release, I dress myself. My hands tremor, my left side slumps, but it’s something I can do now, provided I sit while putting on my pants, lifting one skinny leg into the opening, then the other, and then, when the waistband is at a high, safe level, rise to pull them up. The first morning, I went at it standing and ended up rolling around on the floor in my granny panties.

One positive: My stomach is now flat. I poke, fascinated. Neat. It ain’t a six-pack, but by Christ, I can see my navel for the first time in five years. I’ve subsisted on starchy hospital food during my stay, reacquainting myself with Snack Pack and lukewarm Sprite, greater comfort than a mother’s teat. And still, I’ve lost nearly sixty pounds, mostly muscle mass. I am to take supplements, drink Ensure, do my strength exercises. I run my hand over my head. My hair’s grown back, thin and milky. There’s been a blonde in me all along. I would enjoy looking in the mirror more if one side of my mouth didn’t drip down my face.

I walk to the window and smell the air, closing my eyes. Car exhaust and minerals and salt. It’s the smell of being in unfamiliar but comfortable limbo. Florida is, for now, easier. In New York, I would never stop being reminded of my body’s new frailty.

My suitcase is packed, waiting for when Mel picks me up the next day. On top, my new laptop is closed.

I pick up the laptop and start for the blue Word icon but find myself opening Firefox instead. I grimace. I used to be better about this: buckling down, not even letting myself check my email until I got my hours in. But the curiosity has been digging me raw.

I take a deep breath and type in my name. There’s our Facebook fan page. There’s the Tumblr that Mel updates with bloody clips from old grind-house movies and (occasionally) our stuff. Then I see results:


Nashville Combat Creator Hospitalized After Aneurysm


Nashville Combat Creator in Serious Condition


Mother of Nashville Combat’s Vaught Dies After Assault


The Burdens and Responsibilities of the Memoirist



Skip, skip, skip. At the bottom, an old press release from ReAnimator for Nashville Combat, clip included. It’s the trailer arrest scene—that’s exactly how it was labeled on the storyboard at the beginning of things, when Nashville Combat didn’t even have an ending yet: Trailer Arrest.

I pause, remembering the day we came up with the idea for this section. Mel came into the studio late one morning after dropping ketamine and playing Street Fighter on NES all night, thumbs still twitching, absently chatty. Said, “I saw a hooker getting off the JMZ and she reminded me so much of my mom I almost asked her for money.”

I was at the drafting table, shoeless and sockless, an enormous cup of coffee in my hand. Just kind of fucking around. It struck me, when she said this. Before Combat, Kelly Kay—and Mel’s life in Florida, anything more extensive than what she’d told me the first night I met her—had been an incidental and rare topic of talk. It just didn’t come up much. And sensing blood there, or the possibility of blood if I brought it up at the wrong time, or in the wrong way, I didn’t press.

So I was interested. “How so?” I asked her.

Mel tilted her head back. “For the obvious reasons,” she said.

It was something I’d suspected for years—what Mel’s mom had done, exactly, for money—from stories, little hints. This was the first time Mel had actually confirmed it.

“But she had boyfriends, right?” I said. “What did they think of that?”

“Boyfriends and prostitution are not necessarily mutually exclusive,” Mel said. “But that probably had something to do with choice in boyfriend.”